Secrets of old Shanghai

Secrets of old Shanghai by Bernard Wasserstein I stumbled across the Shanghai police archives quite by accident in 1985 while I was investigating the strange career of I.T. Trebitsch Lincoln (1879-1943). A Hungarian who became MP for Darlington and served as a German agent in both World Wars, Trebitsch Lincoln had caught my fancy a year or so earlier, and I had chased him through the diplomatic, intelligence and police files of half a dozen countries. The final years of his life, however, 1 constituted a black hole in my research. I knew that he had spent them in Shanghai as abbot of a Buddhist monastery, but beyond that I could find very little in the way of authentic information. One day, in the course of a telephone call to John Taylor of the United States National Archives, I happened to mention this problem; whereupon he asked whether I had consulted the Shanghai police archives. I .told him I had not, but that I doubted the Chinese authorities would grant me access to such material. "No, no," he said, " they're not in China; they are here in Washington!" A few days later entered the National Archives building on Pennsylvania Avenue and went to the Modern Military Headquarters Branch which occupies a windowless, low-ceilinged reading-room on the thirteenth floor. Three bulky folders of documents, containing the Shanghai Police reports on Trebitsch Lincoln, were deposited before me. I opened the first batch and entered the world of pre-war Sh~nghai, a once-vibra~t society now as dead as Pharaonic Egypt. The Special Branch of the Shanghai Municipal Police(the British-controlled force that operated in the International Settlement ) kept a close eye on Trebitsch Lincoln almost from the moment that he established his base of operations in the city in 1923. For much of the next sixteen years he was tailed by SMP detectives who recorded his every movement, opened his mail, and questioned his contacts. -The remarkably detailed SMP reports on Trebitsch, all carefully filed in the police archive, vindicate the force's reputation for thorough and reliable reporting. They document his kaleidoscopic rotations of loyalty as he shifted from the entourage of one Chinese warlord to another, acting as "political adviser" and panjandrum, peddling arms, overseas loans and influence, posing as a "fixer", but eventually finding himself exposed as someth.ing closer to a confidence man. The reports further chronicle his embrace of Buddhism following a mystical illumination in 1925, his change of name to "Chao Kung", his elevation t'irst to the rank of bodhisattva and later to 74 that of abbot, his establishment of his own monastery in Shanghai in 1933, his publishing ventures, political pronouncements, and correspondence with various European governments and private individuals . They also follow his unsuccessful efforts to travel to Tibet, his global peregrinations in search of converts to Buddhism, his quarrels with ·rival European Buddhists, and his financial and sexual exploitation of his unfortunate acolytes. But the most revealing sections of the files were those that unveiled Trebitsch's ""connections to the eerie underworld of espionage activity in Shangha-'/ in the 1930s. His involvement with the Japanese security and propaganda apparatus appears to have dated from the time of the "Shanghai incident" of 1932 when the Japanese "Naval Landing Party" occupied much of the Chinese section of the city and for a time seemed to threaten the French Concession and the International Settlement. His relations with the Japanese became a matter of notoriety, and the The New York Times even reported (probably in error) that he had taken up an appointment as adviser to Pu Vi, the Japanese-installed puppet emperor of Manchukuo. The Shanghai police files do not corroborate that report, but they suggest that Trebitsch did become embroiled in the internecine conflicts of the Buddhist leadership of Tibet: in these monkish controversies he aligned.himself with the reputedly anti-British faction of the Panchen Lama who had sought refuge in China in 1925. Trebi tsch also seems to have cultivated relations with other powers: when, in 1936, he moved for a while to Tientsin, the Shanghai police passed the baton to the Chief of...